


Entomology

by apiphile



Category: Black Books
Genre: Comedy, Crack, Humor, Metamorphosis, Multi, Pastiche, apologies even to e l james, apologies to franz kafka, apologies to graham linehan and dylan moran, especial apologies to my recipient, i have very pointedly made this an entirely consensual giant cockroach threesome, it's just that everyone i know who works in the book trade loathes that book, kafka, unnecessary mocking of 50 shades of grey, while acknowledging that it's bringing in a lot of money
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 01:11:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/591752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One as-good-as-morning, as Bernard L Black was waking with an absence of haste or grace from dreams that were possibly anxious, he found that in his bed he had been transformed into a monstrous verminous bug.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entomology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [somebraveapollo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/somebraveapollo/gifts).



One morning, or rather one noon when the sun finally made its way through the taped-shut floral curtains decorated variously with wine stains, nicotine smoke, baked beans, dead flies, jam, and pages torn from one of the encroaching and apparently unstemmable tide of _Fifty Shades of Grey_ which were trying to take over the entire shop – 

That is to say, one early afternoon, which mostly counted as morning.

One “morning”, as Bernard Black was clawing his way fitfully and unwilling back into consciousness from dreams which he wouldn’t remember except as a small nagging doubt in the back of his mind for the next week or two, excavated by Chateu d’Pissweasel at three o’clock in the morning and extracting from him maudlin self-pity although in fairness at three in the morning after a _quantity_ of corner shop piss even the pattern of the cobwebs shadows as cast by the ceiling light was liable to drench him in maudlin self-pity –

So, business as usual.

One “morning”, as Bernard Black was waking up from dreams which were for the sake of the story anxious ones, he discovered that in his bed were an enormous number of both cigarette butts and the ubiquitous copies of _Fifty Shades_ , which they’d run out of space for downstairs and which Manny had selfishly refused to put in the fridge instead of stacking Bernard’s bed with, and in addition to the apparently violated ashtray there was also an empty vodka bottle which had no business being in his bedroom, what with _wine_ being the bedroom drink, and a few items he didn’t care to identify or indeed possess the specialised mycological knowledge to identify but which were probably either mould or fungus or both –

Bernard was struck with the terrible if brief thought that if the fungus and the erotica novels bred his shop would be entirely swamped and he would live out his days in a kind of fibrous nest of soggy knicker gussets and mould, which was what he rather suspected the inside of Fran’s head to be like. 

One as-good-as-morning, as Bernard L Black was waking with an absence of haste or grace from dreams that were possibly anxious, he found that in his bed – in addition to a mutant horde of execrable popular erotic fiction – he had been transformed into a monstrous verminous bug.

He lay on his apparently armoured back and realised that, among other inconveniences perpetrated by the transformation, he’d managed to tear in half the black-ish, ash-stained great coat he habitually slept, ate, drank, lived, and occasionally showered in. 

“Oh _no_ ,” Bernard said, watching his newly-acquired feeble wire-like legs waving above him. “I’ve had that since I was _twelve_.”

If he had been better-acquainted with the lives of arthropods and less fixated previously on their lacklustre extermination (he kept a single elderly brogue for the sole purpose of squashing spiders, but kept forgetting to squash them, on account of the unbelievably funny sounds Manny made when they climbed out of his hair instead), Bernard might have observed that finding oneself on one’s back, as an armour-backed monstrous, verminous bug, was the kind of situation that failed to resolve itself by waving ones legs feebly in the air.

It had never been very good at curing hangovers, either.

Bernard lay still and contemplated his position. He’d definitely read a book about this once, but as far as he could remember it was an analogy for the gruelling grinding misery of something or other and all things considered if anyone ought to be getting turned into a giant cockroach in this house, it was Manny.

He kicked the wall. 

“MANNY!” Bernard shouted. It came out as a high-pitched and humiliating squeak, which wasn’t a wholly new experience but one which was normally reserved for when Manny had come up behind him unexpectedly. “MANNY! MANNY! YOU FUZZ-FRONTED AFFRONT TO HUMAN HYGIENE, THIS OUGHT TO BE _YOU_ —“

A lump of plaster, dislodged by Bernard’s frantic and ineffectual leg-jiggling, fell out of the wall and landed squarely between what Bernard reluctantly owned were probably his mandibles. For a moment this stifled his angry, squeaky protests, but as he discovered, cockroach mandibles made short work of wall plaster and cockroaches had even less taste-based objections to eating the technically inedible than Bernard, muncher-on-coasters and smoker of more cigarettes in a day than most managed in a fortnight. There was no impediment to him calling for Manny again, but a terrible, terrible thought had wedged itself in his waking mind.

“How am I going to _smoke_?” Bernard wailed, and even in his squeaky cockroach voice he could hear the hoarse rasp of nicotine withdrawal.

Did cockroaches have lungs? How did cockroaches breathe? What was he supposed to do when he wanted breakfast wine? He’d already been awake for a good forty seconds, maybe a whole minute, without lighting anything, and it occurred to Bernard that he couldn’t even reach his lighter like this, let alone light the cigarettes that he was probably lying on. The latter part of his predicament, at least, was not unusual. 

“MANNY MANNY MANNY,” Bernard squeaked, waving his ridiculous cockroach legs in the air above him. “MANNY I NEED YOU TO COME AND PUT A CIGARETTE IN WHATEVER HOLE LOOKS MOST LIKE I SHOULD BE SMOKING THROUGH IT—“

The door to Bernard’s room cracked open, stuck on the _Fifty Shades Of Doorstop_ , and bounced back into Manny’s face. Bernard knew, despite his prone position, that it was Manny because in the years he’d spent toasting Manny’s hands, kicking chairs out from under Manny, and hitting Manny in the head with books, he’d grown very accustomed to the particular nuances of Manny’s noises of pain. 

“Bernard?” Manny said, when he’d finished making the irritating and unnecessary howls that usually accompanied a nosebleed. “Bernard? You seem to be a giant cockroach.”

“I KNOW I’M A GIANT FUCKING COCKROACH,” Bernard squeaked, furious. “GET MY CIGARETTES.”

“Oh god,” Manny said, indistinctly. “Oh no. Oh god. What should I do? I don’t know what to do! I never finished reading that book! What happens?”

“NEVER MIND THAT,” Bernard wailed, and even to himself he sounded like several hundred fingernails on one blackboard. “CIGARETTES. NOW. WHERE IS YOUR COMPASSION, YOU BEARDED SIDESHOW FREAK?”

“I’m going to get Fran,” Manny said in a strangled voice, “she’ll … think of something…”

The door swung shut again, and Bernard rocked himself back and forth on in his armoured back in futile indignation. “CAN YOU UNDERSTAND ME, YOU FOLK BAND REJECT? CIGARETTES? MANNY! FOR GOD’S SAKE! MANNY! MANNY! I WILL FIRE YOU IF YOU DON’T COME BACK HERE AND PUT SOMETHING I CAN SMOKE INTO A HOLE I CAN SMOKE IT THROUGH OH GOD—“

Bernard lay on his armour-plated back and listened with furious dejection to the sound of feet on the stairs, the following silence, and the far-off jangle of the door which was usually smothered by his pre-emphysemic coughing. He began to rock on his back, but the motion just made him seasick long before he managed to tip himself over.

“COCKROACHES AREN’T MEANT TO GET SEASICK,” Bernard complained to a sympathetic audience of precisely no one. Cockroaches, he was also quite sure, weren’t meant to suddenly become vessels for Bernard’s mind overnight, and that seemed to be on the cards too. 

He lay in silence: an immeasurable and vast amount of time later the door jangled again and two sets of feet came thundering up the stairs like an army of pigs. “Manny, if this is an elaborate ruse to make me buy more copies of that book I’m not doing it – everyone I know already has one –“

“FRAN!” Bernard squeaked, rocking violently on the bed. “FRAN FRAN FRAN—“

The door creaked open again with entirely wasted gravitas, as no one was listening to it.

“Oh bloody hell,” Fran said in one of her deeper, more manly voices which Bernard had never even considered telling her were in any way attractive because the day she developed self-esteem would be the day he had no one to complain about Manny to. “You weren’t kidding.”

“No, Fran,” Manny said, from somewhere in the corridor, “I don’t think I’ve ever made jokes about Bernard turning magically into a giant cockroach overnight before.”

“Mm,” said Fran. “How do you know it’s Bernard?”

“Well,” said Manny, “he’s lying in Bernard’s bed.”

“Could have eaten Bernard,” Fran said. Bernard felt she sounded entirely too hopeful about this prospect. “They do eat all kinds of rubbish...”

“HEY,” Bernard squeaked, “I WILL HAVE YOU KNOW I AM A FRAGRANT AND DELICIOUS DELIGHT AND ANYWAY IT’S NOT MY FAULT MANNY LEAVES JAM IN THE SHOWER HEAD.”

“It’s lying on his cigarettes,” Manny said in a curiously choked voice. “And Bernard hasn’t hit it with a broom for that yet.”

There was a pause, and in a muffled voice that was unmistakeably I-Have-A-Cigarette-In-My-Mouth-Waiting-To-Be-Lit, Fran said, “He never hits _me_ with a broom for that –“

“He pulled your hair—“

“ _Once_.” Even around the cigarette, Fran’s tone was so grim that Bernard couldn’t help remembering precisely how she’d paid him back for that. It had taken months to grow his eyebrows fully back and at least _two whole face washes_ to get “I am a twat” off the place his eyebrows used to be.

There was, to Bernard’s apparently now-functional sense of smell, the most beautiful scent in the world: a smouldering cigarette. 

“Anyway,” Fran said, exhaling slowly. “If it’s eaten him we can’t do anything about it, cockroaches don’t vomit. It was on TV.”

“If you’re _sure_ it’s eaten him we could always … slit it open like in that fairy tale,” Manny suggested, uncertain. Bernard unleashed a hurricane of high-pitched cockroach swearing which, he admitted, they probably wouldn’t have been able to understand even if he’d been human what with most of it being in Irish. 

A cloud of cigarette smoke turned the air in the room blue-grey. Bernard tried to gasp for it but couldn’t work out which part of his body he should be gasping with. 

“Manny… which fairy tale? I don’t _remember_ there being any about cockroaches.” That was delivered in what Bernard thought of as her Matron voice, which again he’d decided he wasn’t going to tell her was sexy, because she had a face like a paleolithic axe head and he did not find her remotely attractive, previous drunken incidents notwithstanding, and the shape of her arse very firmly and definitely not stored in his long-term memory. 

“Oh, you know the one – she goes into the forest with cake and then ooh and argh and she’s got a really nice coat, and then oh grandma’s secretly not a vegetarian after all, and it all goes a bit wrong and woo-urgh and a man with a beard shows up and bam everyone’s happy again and they’ve got a new carpet,” Manny said. Going by the volume of this spume of idiocy he was back in Bernard’s bedroom again, a situation Bernard had absolutely never contemplated for any reason other than the potential removal and cleaning of his laundry mountain. 

“NONE OF THAT,” Bernard squeaked, waving his limbs. “AND THAT’S WHY YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO WRITE ADVERTISING COPY FOR THE SHOP EITHER.”

“It’s not ringing any bells,” Fran said, deep in contemplation and by Bernard’s estimation also two thirds of the way through a cigarette that she was very selfishly not letting him have any of. She said in a distant voice, “But since it’s wearing the remains of Bernard’s clothing it’s either a very weird giant cockroach cross-dresser or it’s Bernard.” She sighed. “Which probably means we shouldn’t be trying to skin it.”

“I WILL NOT HAVING ANYONE SKINNING GIANT COCKROACHES IN MY BEDROOM WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE ME,” Bernard squealed.

“What are we going to do, what are we going to do?” Manny demanded. Bernard just _knew_ , from the voice and from the thumping of feet and the reverberation of “mould-breaking erotica literature” as it bounced off the floorboards, that Manny was doing his stupid dance of panic. It was the one that made his hair bob up and down like the bobble on the hat of a fucking mountain walker in the Lake District who is plummeting towards someone with the burning desire to shake them by the hand and ask in the most English accent possible what brings them to the fucking Lake District when the person in question doesn’t know where the hell they are or why they’re there or for that matter where their shoes are or why the tequila bottle they are carrying is so very, very empty.

“We need to find out more about cockroaches,” Fran said. “And also possibly sex.”

“WHAT?” Bernard squeaked in horror. “WHAT? YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HELPING ME, NOT INDULGING YOUR SICK FASCINATION WITH ANABELLA IRONFLAPS OR WHATEVER HER FUCKING NAME IS I FORBID YOU TO PICK UP THOSE BOOKS FOR EVEN A SECOND—“

“Where are we going to find—“ Manny began, and broke off. 

“This is a _bookshop_ ,” Fran said sweetly. “Go downstairs, bring up all the books on entomology you can find, and two bottles of wine, and my handbag.”

“Um,” Manny said, “cockroaches aren’t insects.”

“What?”

“You said… entomology… that’s the study of insects … but cockroaches aren’t insects—“

“Yes they _are_.”

“Um,” Manny said again, but he disappeared from the bedroom without any further argument, leaving Bernard to wonder if he was an insect, or an … one of those other things, and what difference it made, and if Manny had gone downstairs to call Rentokil. 

There was a _fwhump_. Bernard hoped it was Fran sitting down, because otherwise the ceiling had fallen in again. 

“I bet you’ve been reading these on the sly,” Fran said under her breath. Cockroach hearing, Bernard found, was unreasonably acute. There was a rustling sound, and then one which Bernard was only marginally less familiar with than the dulcet chimes of the first glass of wine poured from a bottle: the opening of a book. “I bet you have,” Fran went on, “you’re only pretending. You know you want to understand the mystery of women’s minds.”

“THERE IS NO MYSTERY TO WOMEN’S MINDS,” Bernard squealed, kicking his legs in pre-emptive horror. “EVEN IF THERE WAS AFTER TEN YEARS OF YOU EXPUNGING EVERY TRIVIAL BLOODY THOUGHT THAT PASSES THROUGH YOUR HEAD _THERE ISN’T ANY MORE!_ ” He’d been intending to point out that from his wide and continual experience women’s minds seemed to be mostly interested in borrowing tenners out of Bernard’s till, every single man under the age of sixty with a vaguely hemispherical set of arsecheeks, one or two women, and drinking five bottles of Eva’s Vinyard White before throwing up lustily behind a billboard and singing ‘Careless Whisper’ like a football chant all the way home.

But Fran adopted her huskiest voice, the one that made Bernard’s shoes twitch involuntarily, and read, “ _I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror._ ”

“NO,” Bernard shrieked, horrified by his complete lack of ears into which to stuff his tiny legs or his frantically trembling antennae. “NO! YOU STOP THAT – STOP IT NOW –“ he cursed his lack of knowledge of cockroach anatomy, cursed the existence of the unkillable sales gold that was currently insulating his bedroom in double-stacks, and cursed Fran loudly at length.

It was to no avail.

“ _Damn my hair—it just won't behave,_ ” Fran went on, in the same low and husky voice, “ _and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal._ ”

“I WILL MURDER YOU,” Bernard screeched, sounding to himself like a hob-top kettle whistling at the boil, “I WILL MURDER YOU AND THROW YOUR BODY IN REGENTS CANAL IN SUITCASES AND THEY WON’T EVEN BE NICE SUITCASES—“

“Fran,” Manny’s anxious voice echoed up the stairwell like a very hairy butterfly – a moth, Bernard supposed – and quavered into the room. “Fran it says here they emit sex pheromones.”

“I know,” Fran said, in a distracted voice. “Look up the bit about whether or not you can have sex with them.”

“Are you sure –?” Manny’s voice was closer now. “I just think I do feel... unusually _romantic_ ... uhm hum ... we should probably go somewhere else, until...”

“UNTIL WHAT, UNTIL I GET OVER MY FRIVOLOUS FIT OF BEING AN INSECT?” Bernard screamed. “I NEED A – A DOCTOR OR A WIZARD OR A – THAT MAN ON THE TELEVISION WHO HYPNOTISES PEOPLE WITH HIS BEARD—“

“Well anyway,” Fran said, standing up, and leaning over Bernard so that he could see her expression at last. He wasn’t sure he liked it. The leer wasn’t normally directed at him and the book dangling from her hand was exactly the one he’d thought it was, not least because he’d tried to read the first page approximately a hundred times and now had the opening sentences memorised in the place where he used to have important things like his own name. “No, Manny, there’s nothing in here about having sex with giant beetle things and this book is the definitive work on sexuality.”

“No they’re definitely not beetles,” Manny said, flapping a book about. “I checked. You’re right, they’re insects, but they’re not beetles.”

“STOP TALKING ABOUT ME LIKE I’M NOT HERE,” Bernard wailed. “AND STOP DISCUSSING HAVING SEX WITH ME IT’S DISTURBING! I SWEAR I ONLY EVER REMEMBER THE NEW YEAR’S EVE THING WHEN I MASTURBATE SOMETIMES. SOMETIMES. AND I HAVE DEFINITELY NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT MANNY. IN THAT WAY. OR AT ALL. EVER.”

To what Bernard badly _wanted_ to describe as being his horror, the unfeasibly hairy visage of his perennially pointless assistant joined Fran’s hawk-nosed face in leering down at him with an expression he only usually saw levelled at people like the briefly-too-dim-to-realise-Manny-was- _Manny_ Rowena. He curled all his legs protectively over his belly, which he was acutely aware had very little protective effect whatsoever.

“Have you thought _why_ he might be emitting, uh, mating pheromones?” Manny asked, gazing intently at Bernard’s mandibles. There was probably still plaster dust on them, Bernard thought, and he reached up with his topmost legs to try to wipe them clean.

“Yes,” said Fran, gazing deep into Bernard’s eyes. “Yes I _have_.”

“Er, ahah,” Manny said, reaching out to prod Bernard in one of his many knees. “Perhaps we should, y’know. Hahaha. Elsewhere. I mean, no sense in wasting… on a cockroach when… ahahah.”

“Stop being coy,” Fran muttered.

“HEY,” Bernard squeaked, outraged once more. “IF THERE IS GOING TO BE IMPROPER HANKY-PANKY AS A RESULT OF MY HORMONES I DEMAND TO BE THE CENTRE OF IT.”

“No,” Fran said thoughtfully, still peering into Bernard’s eyes. “I think if we’re going to breech the very borders of sexual experimentation and go beyond _even_ that book, Bernard has to come along for the ride if only so he can’t make fun of us for it afterwards.”

“Fair enough,” Manny said with a shrug that, Bernard was shocked to discover, somehow combined lust and indifference in one hunch of the shoulders. 

_Some time later…_

“ _Well_ ,” said Manny, trying to clean bits of plaster dust out of his beard. “That was unexpected.”

“Mm,” Fran said, lazily wiping things Bernard couldn’t identify from out of her hair. “Oh, Manny, pass my cigarettes, will you?”

“I want wine,” Bernard squeaked, more in lieu of having anything else to say than the expectation that he’d get it. He squeaked it quietly, mostly because he’d had all the air fucked out of him at various intervals and was feeling a little fragile, not to mention terribly enlightened.

“Oh, Manny, nip downstairs and get him some wine as well, would you?” Fran added in a limp and sort of unboned voice. “He’ll just go on and on and on if you don’t.”

“Shall do,” Manny said with a salute, as he climbed off the bed and over Bernard’s carapace. “Red or white, Bernard?”

“WHAT?” Bernard squeaked, and added, “RED.” His antennae quivered with rage. “YOU UNDERSTOOD ME. YOU COULD UNDERSTAND ME THE WHOLE TIME.”

“Well, except when you were speaking Irish, haha, that was just like listening to you when you’re drunk,” Manny said, apparently in the doorway still.

“Bernard you just sound like you’ve inhaled about forty helium balloons,” Fran said, smirking to herself. 

“Yeah, we were just ignoring you because it was inconvenient really,” Manny said in a rather elevated voice, “you know, like your parents do? Or your teachers? Mine used to do it all the time: _Miss, Miss, I’ve fallen down a well_ , ‘can anyone hear something?’ … oh, they were great days.”

Bernard found that even in the form of a giant cockroach it was entirely possible to exchange a look of incredulity with Fran.

“You don’t half sound funny, though,” Fran said, patting Bernard on the chest plates.

**Author's Note:**

> Please note all cockroach threesomes involve consent or even assent here. Thanks to betas Marika Kailaya and AbbiChicken. I swear on all that is literature that my other Black Books fic is a lot better than this.


End file.
